Now even the Mets' ownership is laughing at the Mets. These T-shirts were placed in the lockers of each Mets player yesterday at the direction of Jeff Wilpon, the team's chief operation officer. The "U" logo is supposed to represent Underdog, the animated superhero from the 1960s, and the shirts are meant to serve as a sort of rallying cry. But third baseman David Wright, for one, doesn't think it's best for a team of professionals to use a cartoon dog to project their image:

"I don't really like using the whole underdog thing," he said. "I don't like really playing that card. I think it's just a way to remind everybody in here that the outside expectations aren't the expectations that we have for ourselves. And I think Terry did a good job of kind of conveying it today, because obviously the expectations from the outside are low, and understandably so.

"But we in here kind of have to rally around that and get it going. I guess, at the end of the day, that is kind of an underdog theme. But we shouldn't view ourselves as that. We'll let everybody else view ourselves as that, because I think we kind of know what we're capable of doing."

Now that's excitement. Only 37 days until the opener against the Braves. There's no need to fear ... the LOLMets are here.